Burroughs, William S.

Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997) Innovative author who kept company with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

He once said:

Language is a virus…[words]…become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself. » Source

Burrows was a gay ex-junkie who shot to stardom with his book, Naked Lunch, written over three years in a Moroccan hotel room. The protagonist Bill Lee, a heroine addict, travels from New York to Tangiers and then into the Interzone.

There he confronts a hallucinogenic, hellish urban fantasy land where the individual is forced to grapple with the dark and frightening forces of totalitarianism.

According to one account, the manuscript was disjointed and probably would never have been published had not Ginsberg and a few other beatniks saved it from a flooded hotel room floor.

Originally printed in Paris in 1959, it reached the U.S.A. in 1962. There, a well-publicized 1966 obscenity trial over Naked Lunch is usually seen as marking the end of literary censorship in that country. Burrows won the case.

In retrospect, one has to wonder if Burrows was foreseeing the internet and virtual reality with his idea of the Interzone. Others, however, say the Interzone is a metaphor for a borderless city.

Legend has it that Burroughs accidentally killed his wife in 1951, for which he was charged in Mexico with “criminal imprudence.”

Image Source:

• Cropped from original “burroughs1983″ by Chuck Patch, Creative Commons licence at flickr.com » http://flickr.com/photos/65484951@N00/91976954

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